Talking Grammar, Embedded Tweets and #Adminchats

A while ago, Lucy Brazier, Editor of ‘The VA Magazine’ and ‘Executive Secretary’, approached me to ask whether I would host an #Adminchat on Twitter. Loving the idea of raising my profile in the Twittersphere, talking about the finer points of grammar and helping people with specific issues, I said, “Yes”!

For an hour last Thursday night, I fielded questions from all sides about the finer points of grammar. In just sixty minutes, hundreds of tweets flew around between myself, Lucy and everyone else who ‘attended’ the chat on Twitter. People were there from the UK, Canada and the US – and possibly other countries too, I was too busy typing to find out where everyone was based.

Being host, it was mainly my job to answer everybody’s questions. And boy is it hard to explain punctuation or the difference between an adverb and an adjective in 140 characters! I used ‘Tweetchat‘ so that I could only see tweets with #Adminchat in them (and Tweetchat automatically added #Adminchat to every tweet so I didn’t need to worry about that). With the screen set to update every six seconds, I was getting two or three tweets every time it refreshed for an hour. That, my friends, is pressure!

I love grammar and believe that rather than stifling the way people communicate, it enables us to express ourselves more clearly and for our meaning to be better understood by others; a simple mis-placed comma can make all the difference to the meaning of a sentence. I really enjoyed the chat and the hour went by in a flash. Thankfully it was a big success; within minutes of it finishing I was invited to host another one and offered the opportunity to write a series about grammar in a national magazine.

This little story is a preamble to showing you a different type of blog post, one that you may want to have a go at doing yourself: using embedded tweets. This great post from Social Media Examiner goes into detail about how to embed tweets and use them creatively. Below I have written a quick guide for those of you who don’t have time to read the post:

– go to ‘Expand’ at the bottom of a tweet

– hit ‘Details’

– then ‘Embed this tweet’

– choose the alignment you want

– then copy the HTML or Shortcode into your post

Done.

One tip, work out which tweets you are going to use and which order you want them to appear in before you start embedding them, it just makes it a bit quicker.

Below is an extract from Thursday night’s #Adminchat, which your blog post would look like (the numbering went a bit crazy for a while so please ignore that!)…